Previews

Tony Hawk's Project 8

Neversoft is working on a visually enticing Tony Hawk game for next gen consoles, Tony Hawk's Project 8.

Spiffy:

A huge graphics upgrade over anything we've seen from a Tony Hawk game; a focus on lifelike animation.

Iffy:

Not many details on gameplay features, game modes, or specifics regarding online play.

If there's any athlete that appears absolutely ready for representing in the next generation of consoles, it's Tony Hawk. With Tony Hawk's Project 8, Neversoft is attempting to take advantage of the processing power of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and are pushing the envelope, taking extreme sports games where they haven't gone before.

For one thing, Tony Hawk's Project 8 will feature a fully streaming world with more detail than you've seen in any previous Tony Hawk game. Previous games have tried to hide their load times by using corridors to connect various areas, streaming the new area's content as you traveled from one place to the next. We were told that the multiple cores in the 360 and PS3 allow for new details to be included in the world.

The premise behind Tony Hawk's Project 8 is that the Birdman is putting together a skate team and is searching for the top 8 amateur skaters in the world. Your created character will start off as an amateur skater, fighting to gain the respect of the pros, struggling to make a name for himself and ultimately make it to Tony's team. Real-life skaters in the game were taken to the Neversoft studios and underwent full facial and body scans, and high resolution photos with a 20 mega pixel camera were also taken, resulting in character models that are made up of 100 thousand polygons in the head alone.

Some of the minute details that haven't been included in previous skateboarding games are part of Project 8 from the get-go. For instance, speed wobbles, the spontaneous shaking of a skateboard (or other vehicle) at high speeds, has been realized utilizing the game's physics engine and included in the game. Lots of other graphics-intensive buzzwords were dropped, including the usage of normal maps, depth of field, radio blur, cube maps, ambient light maps, and bloom. What does that all mean? You'll be able to see the most minute of details in the game, including every crack in the concrete as you ride down the game's sidewalks and city streets.

Neversoft took their crew to Birdhouse studios and recorded Tony Hawk on the 14 foot ramp, dissecting his range of motion and characteristics for use in the game. Skaters will dynamically react to the environment, with animations transitioning between base movement and stances for going fast, slow, or balancing right and left. As opposed to using just one animation routine for something like grinding, six different animations are balanced and chained together to accurately simulate a rail grind. The physics engine is capable of predicting where a skater is going to land, and the animation plays appropriate layers for each segment of an ollie. When the game kicks into slow motion mode, activated to get a lower camera perspective that focuses on the skater's feet and the board, you'll be hard pressed to find a hitch that exposes the skater as anything less than accurately depicting real-life movements. The improved animation tree and blending system can combine 20 animations in real time to recreate one realistic motion.

While all the technical improvements are astounding, you're still assured of getting a solid skateboarding experience, with goals and levels that should attract fans of the previous games. The redesigned goal system has three difficulty levels -- AM, PRO, and SICK -- but further details weren't readily available. Set for release in fall for 360 and PS3, a version of the game without all of the technical improvements will also be released for the current gen systems. Keep an eye out for more on Tony Hawk's Project 8 after E3, when we can nail down specifics on gameplay and online play.